Featured Video

Supporters

Getting Started with MicrobeWorld

For years, Americans have heard blue-ribbon commissions and major industrialists bemoan a shortage of scientists caused by an inadequate education system. A lack of high-tech talent, these critics warn, so threatens the nation’s continued competitiveness that the U.S. must drastically upgrade it...
Read More

A breakthrough in decoding gene regulation of Helicobacter pylori has been made by an international research team led by Jörg Vogel of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. Using a newly developed sequencing technique, the researchers discovered 60 small ribonucleic acids (sR...
Read More

About 350 people who got sick a week into a Caribbean cruise were responding well to medicine, the cruise line said Tuesday. Celebrity Cruise spokeswoman Cynthia Martinez said 326 of the more than 1,800 passengers on the Celebrity Mercury began complaining Sunday of upset stomachs, vomiting and...
Read More

Imagine a planet with an atmosphere lacking oxygen, its landscape dotted with volcanic craters, caustic oceans, and basins of brine. Yet, amazingly, these oceans and brines teem with life, albeit very different from our own-microorganisms that breathe arsenic. That description may describe the E...
Read More

Doctors (and patients) have long known that influenza in temperate areas is more common in the winter, and that some winters are worse for flu than others. Now they know why – drier winter air keeps the flu virus alive longer and the drier the air, the more flu.

A study published in Monday’s edition of Archives of Internal Medicine estimates that 48,000 people died in 2006 after developing sepsis or pneumonia during their hospital stays. Altogether, such infections forced patients to spend an extra 2.3 million days in the hospital and ...
Read More

This past week I found myself asking this question quite a few times. What is going on with the peer review process? Is anyone actually reviewing the papers getting into journals anymore?
Peer review is a process that is meant to ensure that only high quality scientific publications make it to ...
Read More

How do you study-and try to cure in the laboratory-an infection that only humans can get? A team led by Salk Institute researchers does it by generating a mouse with an almost completely human liver. This "humanized" mouse is susceptible to human liver infections and responds to human drug treat...
Read More

A team led by PhD researcher Dr Colleen Lau from the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland, has discovered the disease, known medically as leptospirosis, was traditionally a concern for males working in the agricultural and livestock industries, as it is contracted from con...
Read More

Elio Schaechter of Small Things Considered asks if there is an evolutionary advantage for budding, where cell division is asymmetrical (yeast is an example), over binary fission, asexual reproduction by cell division?

Snippet:

"Binary fission is a most impressive invention. In one fell swo...
Read More

Even as officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are announcing that the epidemic of the H1N1 flu is no longer widespread in any state, no disease expert is willing to say there isn't a third -- or fourth -- wave of swine flu in the country's future.

A new research suggests that typhoid fever bacteria collect on gallstones to perpetuate the disease.

People who harbour these bacteria in their gallbladders, even without symptoms, can infect others with active typhoid fever, especially in developing areas of the world where sanitation is poo...
Read More

Polyurethane plastics used to make a host of products from furniture fillings to shoe soles, cable insulation and paints – and which can be difficult to recycle – could soon be degraded in compost heaps, thanks to a study at the University of Manchester.

Since electron micrographs first revealed the bullet-shaped morphology of vesicular stomatitis virus (a virus related to rabies virus), understanding the architecture has been elusive. It was known that the RNA genome is wrapped in a helical structure by the viral nucleocapsid (N) protein, but h...
Read More